Networking giant Cisco Systems announced plans to purchase Lowell, Massachusetts-based GeoTel Communications in a stock swap deal that values the company at approximately $2bn. Under the terms of the agreement, San Jose, California-based Cisco will exchange 0.5138 shares of its common stock for every outstanding share of GeoTel. The acquisition, which has been approved by both boards of directors, will be accounted for as a pooling of interests and is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter, Cisco said. The networking company said the acquisition marks the last phase of its five-phase enterprise data, voice and video integration strategy, designed to bring call control and call management solutions packet-based, IP networks. Buying GeoTel gives the networking giant access to the company’s call center products for the internet, which Cisco will sell to its enterprise and service provider customers to enable them to offer better customer support services.
Allaire announced the $20m acquisition of Bright Tiger Technologies. Bright Tiger is a provider of web application scalability and management technology that Allaire already incorporates in its ColdFusion Enterprise 4.0 web application development suite. Allaire is issuing around 300,000 shares for the acquisition, which based on the day the deal was announced, values Bright Tiger at $17.0m. Allaire is also assuming $3m of Bright Tiger’s debt, which it will pay off immediately and it also expects to pay charges of $2.2m. The acquisition is being accounted for as a pooling of interests. The addition of Bright Tiger gives Allaire its ClusterCats load balancing and server failover technology that has featured in ColdFusion since 4.0 was introduced last fall. In the second half of this year, Allaire will introduce a framework of pre-built e-commerce application components that is being tested under the code name of Tempest. The components apparently include content management and personalization tools.
French IT services giant Cap Gemini Group bought Beechwood, a New Jersey telecommunications services firm for around $200m, as part of the firm’s push into the US market. After a long period of little inorganic US expansion, the company now intends to push itself up from somewhere between 12th and 15th in the market with acquisitions. The company has confirmed that it intends to make a secondary public offering on either Nasdaq or NYSE to raise cash for acquisitions. The combined company will offer customer relationship management and billing consulting and management.
Lotus announced the acquisition of workflow software house, ONEstone Holding. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It becomes part of the Lotus Knowledge Management division, and was acquired, says the company, to strengthen the workflow capabilities within Lotus’ Domino foundation technologies, which already include lower-level workflow capabilities.
